Hi,
I'm trying to evaluate ways to start an RCP Application by clicking a link in a webbrowser. (Yes, I know that is a stupid idea and is basically against the point of webbrowsers, but our customer wants this, so what can I do?)..

I came up with the following ideas:
- Have some activeX thingy start the application.. the disadvantage of activeX is obvious though
- have some webserverlike thing running on the machine that will open the application when a link to that browser is used
- Associate a filetype with the application and have the link be a link to a file of that type.

Right now I'm trying to build a prototype for the third idea...
I have a link that looks something like this:

This worked find for firefox (it asked what application to open this file type with from now on, when I first clicked on the link, and worked fine ever after)

Here's my problem now:
Unfortunately this needs to also work for Internet Explorer, and IE only lets me download the file. Once it's dowloaded it will let me open it and I registered the filetype with windows, so windows knows what application to use!..
I need a way to get rid of the download dialog though. I searched the net and read something about Secure MIMETypeHandlers or something similar that either sounded like a lot of C programming or I just couldn't make much sense of. Does anyone know what I actually have to do to make this work for IE?

I'm also grateful for any ideas of getting this to work differently. I realize that my ideas might not be the best ones by far :-)